Excellent Idea of the Day: Dogs Sniff Out Disease

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It's not unusual to see beagles in airports, sniffing suitcases
for potential explosives. But hospitals?

At two Dutch hospitals, yes. After two months of training, a
beagle detected the presence of Clostridium difficile, a bacteria
that can cause severe diarrhea and colitis in 25 out of 30
patients. The dog also correctly identified 265 out of 270
people who were not sick in the study published in
BMJ.

An increasing number of patients die from C. difficile
in the United States -- about 14,000 each year, usually in
hospital or long-term care settings, according to
Time Magazine. Most the patients are frail or
immune-suppressed.

Study author Dr. Marjie Bomers and her colleagues came up with
the dog-as-doctor idea when they heard a nurse talking about the
unique smell of C. difficile diarrhea.

"We thought, 'Hey, if a human nose can recognize C.
difficile with reasonable accuracy, a dog should be able to
do it easily, since they have such an amazing sense of smell,'"
Bomers told Time.

Other methods of detecting the bacteria are available, but
they're not as quick or as cheap. Bomers hopes that dogs could
eventually provide a first scan of facilities with high rates of
C. difficile, which could help health care providers
contain the infection.